The industrial-scale farming that has made Canada a world leader in growing and exporting wheat has weakened crop resistance to blight, fungus and other diseases — a catastrophe in the making. Traditional ways of breeding new strains to address these dangers is slow and labour-intensive and genetically modified (GM) crops are steeped in controversy.

But two Saskatoon students believe they have found a faster, better way to develop new strains of wheat which not only have the potential to make wheat more disease-resistant, it may well have tremendous health benefits as well.

Pranay Pratijit, 15, a Grade 11 student at Evan Hardy Collegiate, and his sister Prakriti, 13, in Grade 9 at Walter Murray Collegiate, placed third in the 2009 sanofi-aventis Biotalent Challenge (SABC).

This year, they wanted to do a project with the potential to improve both the economy and human health: to produce new varieties of wheat without either soaking seeds in gene-altering chemicals or adding genes from other species.

Working with Drs. Ravindra N. Chibbar and Pooba S. Ganeshan at the University of Saskatchewan, they treated immature spikes of wheat with a chemical that caused them to produced mutated seeds. The mature seeds were then grown and the seeds from the second generation tested for mutations.

One of the variants showed something more than expected. They found a mutation in a gene that could grow a new strain of wheat with a type of starch which offers a number of known health benefits: it helps prevent type II diabetes, osteoporosis and obesity, thanks to fewer calories. Foods containing this starch also act in the digestive system to prevent the occurrence of colon cancer.

Dr. Chibbar is excited by the possibilities. “The future for this novel approach for creating mutations is tremendous,” he says. “Once confirmed, material can be used to incorporate mutation into new varieties for developing healthy starch for human consumption. Also, we can start looking for resistance against wheat diseases.”

The project involved 6 hours a day from the start of the summer last year and three hours a day during the school year. Says Pranay: “I know it sounds like a long time but it was fun.”

Pranay and Prakriti both have their eyes set on careers in science and credit the SABC with giving them the opportunity to work at such a high level so young. “The fact that just the two of us inside a lab could potentially change the world was an overwhelming feeling.”